Rilke Malte Love

8/12/2019 Rilke Malte Love

1/26

Article accepted for publication inModernism/modernity.

Rilkes Landscape of the Heart:

On The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Rilke received the galley proofs for The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggein March 1910

and in anticipation of the page proofs that were to follow, he wrote his editor Anton Kippenberg,

Please let me indicate in the page proofs where the first volume should end. Determine it

yourself if possible, or, in case of doubt, give me two places to choose from.1 Rilkes

suggestion that the editor could himself decide where to divide the novel has been interpreted as

a sign that the division was an afterthought of little significance for the novel.2 This view has

largely dominated in Rilke scholarship. With few exceptions, critics have concentrated on the

thematic concerns that organize various portions of theNotebooks, which otherwise would

appear to have no organizing principle.3Such an approach is not surprising given the nature of

this work, which presents itself as a collection of reflections, observations and notes (in a word:

Aufzeichnungen) written at random or when the author was inspired to record his impressions.

(The fiction of the novel is that it is the jottings of a Danish writer of noble birth who moves to

Paris to write, though he is unable to produce anything but hisAufzeichnungen.)

Yet the division of theNotebooksinto two books is not incidental. It places at the heart of

the work a caesura that enables it to continue, albeit along a different path which no longer has

Maltes here-and-now or present as its point of orientation or anchor. If the first half of the novel

is devoted to Maltes efforts at learning to see, the second is devoted to his efforts at learning to

love. If the first records his adventures in Paris, where he lives in destitute poverty, the second

records the adventures of others in a distant past and sometimes in distant places, to boot. If the


2/26

2first focuses on Maltes experiences as a writer whose authority is threatened at every turn, the

second considers models of writing that are immune to the threat of the loss of authority. The list

of opposing attributes could be continued, but suffice it to say that the distinction between the

first and second books is clear, consistent and thorough and hardly addressed in the secondary

literature.

This neglect is unfortunate, as it obscures the efforts Rilke made in this work and his late

poetry more generally to sketch a model of poetic sovereignty that no longer revolves around the

autonomous individual. TheNotebooks conclude with a tribute not to Orphic but to Sapphic

poetry, which comes about through the poets surrender to his or her death to be born anew in a

world without subject or object, a world that is boundless. In Rilkean terms, one could say that

Sapphic poetry consists in the willingness of the poet to fall without cease into the vortex of

being that she herself opens through her writing. (Heidegger will call this vortex the Zug des

ganzen Bezuges [the traction of the attraction] in his 1946 essay Wozu Dichter? in which

he claims that Rilke, like Nietzsche, conceives of being as the will which both releases things

and gathers them together in a manner similar to the earths gravitational pull.4)The first half of

theNotebooksis significant in that it traces Maltes efforts to keep death at bay and to remain

standing upright in the face of forces larger than himself, even if they come from his interior.

But only in the second half does he learn the pleasure of falling, as formulated in the tenth and

finalDuino Elegy, where good fortune (Glck) is said to fall like rain in the spring:

Aber erweckten sie uns, die unendlich Toten, ein Gleichnis,

siehe, sie zeigten vielleicht auf die Ktzchen der leerenHasel, die hngenden, oder

meinten den Regen, der fllt auf dunkles Erdreich im Frhjahr.

Und wir, die ansteigendes Glck

denken, empfnden die Rhrung,

die uns beinah bestrzt,


3/26

3wenn ein Glcklichesfllt.

5

[But if the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us,

perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the bare

branches of the hazel-trees, or

would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime.

And we, who have always thoughtof happiness as rising, would feel

the emotion that almost overwhelms us

whenever a happy thingfalls.6]

Fearing the Unknown

Throughout the first half of the novel Malte is overcome with fear and while this fear has no

specific object, it would not be incorrect to say it is a fear of death, which confronts him at every

turn. Maltes Paris is one in which beggars with mangled limbs approach him as if they had been

expecting him for some time, and strangers take his customary seat in a caf only to collapse

before his eyes. The horrors he confronts in Paris are not unlike those Rilke experienced in 1902,

when he arrived in the city to write a study of Rodin, for which he received a modest

commission. (This was his sole source of income at the time.) Many of Maltes descriptions of

Paris are in fact taken from Rilkes letters with only slight modification, and the date that opens

theNotebooks, September 11th, rue Toullier, alludes to Rilkes first address in Paris11, rue

Toullier.7

Yet for all the emphasis on Paris theNotebooksdo not fit easily in the category of city

literature. If anything, the urban landscape provides Malte with an occasion to reflect on his own

mortality and suffering as embodied in the urban poor or made manifest in public fixtures (e.g.,

hospitals, libraries, a demolished apartment house, etc.). Kte Hamburger thus refers to Malte as

a phenomenologist of suffering who is more interested in the knowledge he can derive from


4/26

4the travails of others than any existential involvement in their situation.

8Ulrich Flleborn argues

in a similar vein that the dangers Malte is exposed to in Paris lead him to question the ontological

constitution of the human being.9 It is hardly surprising then that the anxiety Malte suffers in

Paris is no different than the terror that gripped him in his youth at his familys country estate.10

In both places Malte encounters the shadow or specter of his own death which he supposedly

bears within himself. He is confronted with visions of his insides turned inside out, which

perhaps accounts for the strange references to bodily fluids (pus, mucus, spit, urine, etc.)

throughout the novels first half.11

A telling scene in this regard occurs at the Salptrire where Malte has been summoned to

undergo electro-shock therapy. As soon as Malte sees the other patients in the waiting room, he

assumes his summons is a sign: It was, so to speak, the first official confirmation that I

belonged to the outcasts [die Fortgeworfenen] (55,KAIII:492). If a mere glance at the other

patients can convince Malte that he has joined their ranks, it is because they literally constitute

outcasts, beings that have been tossed or cast out, as becomes evident in Maltes catalogue of

his fellow patients, who all appear to be overflowing or spilling out of themselves. There is a

man with a red,swollenneck (56), a sobbing child, a woman whose eyelids were constantly

overflowing (56), and finally a girl whose mouth hung open, so you could see the white,slimy

gums with their stunted teeth (56). These comments are consistent with Maltes descriptions of

the outcasts elsewhere. In one passage he refers to them as husks of men that fate hasspewed

out (40) and to underscore their liquid nature immediately adds: Wetwith thespittleof fate,

they stick to a wall, a lamp-post, a billboard, or they trickleslowly down the street, leaving a

dark, filthy trail behind them (40). As a residue that fate has spit out, the outcasts transgress the

borders of the body and expand in all directions at once. It is this aspect that inspires Maltes


5/26

5fear, which is less a fear of infection than one of immensity or size. Malte is convinced that the

body is a vessel for something larger than it which, once exposed, will quickly outgrow or

outsize it.

It is no wonder then that sitting in the waiting room at the Salptrire he is transported back to

his childhood when he was seized with terror at what he called das Groe (KA III:497), the Big

Thing or even Bigness itself. The name, however crude, is surprisingly apt since the one feature

of this object is that it is always bigger than Malte no matter how large he gets:

For the first time in many, many years, it was there again. What had filled me

with my first, deep horror [Entsetzen], when I was a child and lay in bed with a

fever: the Big Thing [das Groe]. Thats what I had always called itAnd now itwas there againNow it was growing out of me like a tumor, like a second head,

and was a part of me, although it certainly couldnt belong to me, because it was

so big. It was there like a large dead animal which, while it was alive, used to be

my hand or my armMy heart had to beat harder to pump the blood into the BigThing: there was barely enough bloodThe Big Thing swelled and grew over my

face like a warm bluish boil, and grew over my mouth, and already my last eye

was hidden by its shadows. (61-62,KAIII:497)

The unmistakable motif in this passage is that of pregnancy and birth. Malte gives birth to an

entity connected to him by an umbilical cord that pumps ever more blood into it. Insofar as the

Big Thing emerges from his body, Malte is forced to recognize it as a part of himself. At the

same time the growth fills him with deep horror [Entsetzen] because it deposes him (in

German, entsetzt ihn) as master of his body, his limbs. He therefore describes the Big Thing as a

second head, which is to say a second mind, as well as a distorted if not grotesque version of his

own body: It was there like a large dead animal which, while it was alive, used to be my hand or

my arm. Limbs that Malte once considered to be subject to his will slip from his grasp and in

slipping they confront him as his opposite, i.e., something animal as opposed to human,

something dead as opposed to alive.


6/26

6Among the most famous passages in Rilkes letters is one in which he claims that death is not

the opposite but the hidden side of life which no amount of thought can ever illuminate: Just

like the moon, life surely has a side that is perpetually turned away from us and which is not its

counter-part but its complement toward perfection, toward consummation, toward the really

sound and full sphere and orb of being.12 In Wozu Dichter? Heidegger criticizes Rilke for

approaching being in this passage in quantitative terms as the sum of two halves or sides that,

taken together, constitute the whole of being.13

Yet as he himself admits the significance of

Rilkes letter does not lie in its depiction of life as a globe or sphere with a side turned away

from us like the moon, which is never visible in its entirety. Rather the significance of the letter

lies in its attempt to conceive of death as something positive or, to quote Rilke, to read the word

death without negation [das Wort Tod ohne Negation zu lesen].14

From theBook of Hours onwards Rilke struggles to affirm deaths presence in life, which

amounts to saying to affirm the presence of that which withholds itself or escapes our

comprehension. The final cycle in theBook of Hours, the Book of Poverty and Death, was

written in 1903, just a year before Rilke began work onMalte Laurids Brigge. The parallels

between the two works could not be more pronounced. Take for instance the following lines

from the Book of Poverty and Death which anticipate the metaphors Malte will use in the

Notebooksto explore the relation of life and death:

Denn wir sind nur die Schale und das Blatt.Der groe Tod, den jeder in sich hat,

das ist die Frucht, um die sich alles dreht. (KAI:236)

[For we are only hull and leaf.

The large death, which each of us carries within,

is the fruit around which everything turns.]


7/26

7While Rilke may represent death here as the hidden fruit and axis around which all life revolves,

he was also aware that the matter could be approached from the reverse directionfrom the

outside, as it were. In theDuino Elegies he insists that we introduce death as a negative force

into the world in dividing being, which is otherwise continuous, into a set of objects. We disrupt

the boundlessness of being in setting things apart and turning them into objects that stand

opposite as well as opposed to us. Thus in the Eighth Elegy, he declares, This is what fate

means: to be opposite, / to be opposite and nothing else, forever [Dieses heit Schicksal:

gegenber sein / und nichts als das und immer gegenber], in lines that conspicuously play on

the German word for object Gegenstand, which literally means that which stands opposite.

15

But

death is also a reserve we harbor within ourselves and to the extent that we carry it, we are the

bearers of something larger than ourselves. Whether this inner reserve can be a source of strength

is the central question of the text.

Malte takes up this issue in the eighth entry in the novel, which is also the first in which he

remembers an incident from the past, though it is unclear whether he witnessed it himself.

Maltes grandfathers death could just as well be the stuff of legend, which is what Malte needs

to counter the anonymity of modern death, which was the subject of the previous entry. In a

somewhat predictable critique of modernity, Malte complains that death has become a mass-

produced phenomenon, churned out in hospitals, where patients die in a manner fitting their

disease rather than their person. The story of Maltes paternal grandfather is supposed to attest to

a time when one could still have a death of ones own or, put otherwise, when death could still

be a work, an accomplishment.

Malte assures us that the Chamberlain Christoph Detlev Brigge died in a manner befitting a

nobleman, which is to say with a certain largesse. His struggle takes over two months and during


8/26

8this period all life ceases in the village where the Brigge family had ruled for generations. And

yet for all of Maltes emphasis on the grandeur of his grandfathers death, it would be hard to say

that the episode confirms the Chamberlains power as lord and master of the village. In death the

grandfather yields to a force larger than himself, which becomes apparent as Malte describes the

almost comical swelling of his body: He lay on the floor in the middle of the room, enormously

swelling out of his blue uniform. At first [the servants] had tried to lay him on the bed, butthe

bedturned out to be too small (12). It is not the Chamberlain who grows and swells in this

period but his death, which pours out of him and assumes the role of sovereign, as the

grandfather himself is dispossessed. Malte consequently invents the compound noun Christoph

Detlevs death to refer to the force that terrorizes the village for ten weeks, like a king who is

called the Terrible, afterward and for all time (15). Death is a terrifying king because it exposes

every individual as a hull or shell for a force that cannot be contained once it begins to take

effect in the world.

In a provocative reading of the novel Winfried Eckel asserts that Maltes experiences are

organized around two opposing principles that are dialectically related.16

The first is identified

with Maltes paternal family and consists in the drawing of boundaries to reaffirm the identity of

the self. The second is associated with Maltes maternal family, the Brahes, and consists in the

transgressing of boundaries to dissolve the self. For Eckel the Chamberlains death exemplifies

the former principle, though not without paradox. The Chamberlain asserts himself in dying to

the extent that he appropriates that which is absolutely other than him: his death, his negation.17

The Brahe principle operates in an equally paradoxical, if reverse fashion. The death of Maltes

maternal grandfather is not represented in the novelMalte mentions it only in passing twice

but the omission is significant given what we do know about Count Brahes view of death: The


9/26

9passing of time had absolutely no meaning for him; death was a minor incident which he

completely ignored; people whom he had once installed in his memory continued to exist, and

the fact that they had died did not alter that in the least (31). If the Chamberlain lays claim in

dying to what is other than him, the Count surrenders in dying completely to the other with the

result that he never has to face his own death. He loses anything proper, anything that belongs

uniquely to him in abandoning himself to the other before death has a chance to overtake him.

However supple this interpretive model may be, it is predicated upon a distinction between self

and other that the novel consistently undermines. The apparent other in the first book is always

something in Malte himself. One could even say it is his death albeit with the caveat that death is

not the opposite of life for Rilke; it is not a negation of presence.

Malte first glimpses the supposed other he carries within him in an episode from his

childhood that has all the hallmarks of trauma. Indeed, it would not be far-fetched to say that the

incident resembles the Lacanian mirror stage except that it does not culminate in the formation of

an ideal ego.18

Malte recalls that he stole into the attic one day at the familys country home

where he found a wardrobe full of costumes and shawls which he draped himself in while

watching himself in a mirror, itself composed of irregular pieces of green glass (103). In the

course of admiring himself, he accidentally trips on a shawl and knocks over a table with

porcelain trinkets on it which fall to the floor and break. But more disturbing still is the sight of

a perfume bottle that had broken into a thousand tiny fragments, from which the remnant of

some ancient essence [Essenz] hadspurted outthat now formed a stain with a very repugnant

physiognomy (106, emphasis added). The ancient essence flowing from the bottle is

reminiscent of the bodily fluids that oozed from the pores of the outcasts in Paris. Here, however,

the secretions take a particular form. They spread out before Malte as a repulsive


10/26

10physiognomy, a face of sorts, in which he is forced to recognize himself as something archaic

that cannot be contained any longer. This is by no means the only scene in the novel in which

Malte confronts himself as an opponent or adversary, but it is one of the few in which he

identifies himself as a blot or stain: the stain of an ancient essence that cannot be erased.

The other place where Malte refers to himself in this fashion occurs shortly after he witnesses

a man die in a Paris crmeriehe regularly visits. Malte at least believes the man has died because

of a bond (50) he feels with hima bond based on nothing but the intuition that he and this

stranger are no different. The intuition enables him to claim that he knows what is happening in

this man, as if it were happening in himself: Yes, he knew that he was now withdrawing from

everything in the world, not merely from human beings (51). Lest this seem a casual remark,

Malte reiterates it a few moments later, albeit with a slight change in syntax that profoundly

alters the dynamics of the situation: I tell myself: Nothing has happened, and yet I was able to

understand this man just because inside me too something is taking place that is beginning to

withdraw and separate me from everything (52). In recalling what he witnessed, Malte is able to

distance himself from the scene since he now assumes the role of narrator, as indicated by the

phrase I tell myself that prefaces his comment. The formulaic utterance places the mans

withdrawal from the world in a frame which protects Malte from being drawn (or withdrawn)

from his own time and place. Indeed the moment Malte says I, he establishes his time and

place as an instance of discourse in Benvenistes vocabulary, a subject in language.19

Malte

turns to writing with the same hope that it will bolster him. Yet here too he finds that writing

withdraws him from the world and especially himself as the author and narrator of his own

experience: For the time being I can still write all this downBut the day will come when my


11/26

11hand will be distant, and if I tell it to write, it will write words that are not mineThis time, I

will be written. I am the impression that will transform itself (52-53).

Blanchot interprets this passage as the conclusion of the novel, though it occurs early in the

work, since it anticipates the day when Malte will cease to write and persist merely as a recorded

impression.20No other passage announces as clearly as this one does Maltes eventual

disappearance as a living writer and reemergence as a dead lettera blot or stain, as it were. To

the extent that we read Maltes writing in a book, it is tempting to say that this day has already

come and Malte exists henceforth only as a written impression.21Yet the truth of Maltes

statement is not primarily temporal; his utterance is not borne out in time. Rather even as he

writes he finds himself written by another hand, which is not so much the hand of another as his

own hand which has, as it were, become something other. It is worth recalling that Malte

compared the Big Thing to a large dead animal which, while it was alive, used to be my hand or

my arm (61).

Malte had a nearly identical experience in childhood and, not surprisingly, the episode

occurred while he was trying his hand at artspecifically the art of drawing or in German

Zeichnen. He was in other words engaged in an act that anticipates his later preoccupation with

sketches, reflections, and notes orAufzeichnungen. According to Malte, on this one evening he

was drawing a picture of soldiers in battle, which was his favorite theme at the time, when his

crayon suddenly fell to the floor and rolled under the table. With the disappearance of his

crayon, the scene rapidly turns from the quaint to the phantasmagoric, as did the scene in the

attic, when Malte tripped on the shawls he draped himself in. Here, however, the experience is

not primarily visual. Malte relies instead on his sense of touch as he crawls under the table and

has to adjust to the darkness:


12/26

12My eyescould not perceive anything at all under the table, where blackness

seemed so dense that I was afraid I would knock against it[I] was about to callMademoiselle and ask her to bring the lamp for me, when I noticed that to my

involuntarily adapted eyes, the darkness was gradually growing more

transparentI recognized my own outspread hand moving down there all alone,

like some strange crab, exploring the ground. I watched it, I remember, almostwith curiosity. (93-94)

Whether it is true that Malte regarded his hand almost with curiosity at the time of this episode

or only in retrospect is impossible to determine here. What is, however, apparent is that he

invokes the metaphor of drowning to describe his experience under the table. The metaphor is

written all over the passage but is especially prominent in Maltes comment that his hand moved

like some strange crab, exploring the ground in this nether region. The implicit references to

drowning suggest that what is traumatic about this episode is not the darkness per se, but the

sensation of being pulled down by a force one is powerless to resist.

This becomes apparent when Malte spots another hand crawling toward him:

It came groping in a similar fashion from the other side, and the two outspread

hands blindly moved toward each other. My curiosity was not yet satisfied, but

suddenly it was gone and there was only horror. I felt that one of the handsbelonged to me and that it was about to enter into something it could never return

from. With all the authority [Recht] I had over it, I stopped it, held it flat, and

slowly pulled it back to me, without taking my eyes off the other one, which kept

on groping. I realized that it wouldnt stop, and I dont know how I got up again.(94,KAIII:520)

Elsewhere in theNotebooksMalte will lament that our two hands never act in concert with each

other and thus invariably cancel each other out. Here, however, the threat is not the division but

the unity of two hands. Malte fears that the hands will form a compact with each other against

him and will literally and figuratively overturn him by pulling him down, possibly to the bottom

of the sea. Hence with all the authority (Recht) he can muster he drags one hand back. Yet as

the phrase mit allem Recht suggests, his authority extends only to die rechte Hand. The left


13/26

13hand remains below in region Malte can never illuminateneither with his visual nor his verbal

sketches, hisZeichnungenorAufzeichnungen.

Virtually every encounter Malte has in Paris follows this pattern. He sees someone or

something that inspires terror in him, since he cannot disengage himself from this person or

object, as it embodies a force inside him. His response in every case is the same. He rushes back

to his room to write in the hope that writing will make him master of the situation. Comments

like, One must take some action against fear (7) and I have taken action against fear. I sat up

all night and wrote (16), abound in the first half of the novel and their inclusion would suggest

that even if Malte did not overcome his fear, he succeeded in giving it form, in capturing it in his

notebooks.

There is, however, another possibility for interpreting Maltes writing which Malte himself

states in the passage that begins with the words, For the time being, I can still write all this

downBut the day will come when my hand will be distant, and if I tell it to write, it will write

words that are not mine (52). The passage continues, The time of that other interpretation will

dawn, when there shall not be left one word upon another, and every meaning will dissolve like a

cloud and fall down like rain (52-53). While Malte may refer to the time of that other

interpretation with foreboding, he also conceives it as a new day, when the words he writes will

no longer be fixed to the page and will instead dissolve like clouds bursting with rain. Of note is

the reversal of imagery that transpires in this passage. The secretions that previously terrified

Malte are transformed here into rain, that is, into an outpouring that promises not death but life, a

new beginning. The passage is in this regard a precursor to the closing stanzas of theDuino

Elegies, where a happy thing [Glckliches] is hypothesized as falling like rain in the spring.

Malte himself seems to recognize the promise of this moment when he says, Just one step, and


14/26

14my misery would turn into bliss. But I cant take that step; I have fallen and I cant pick myself

up (53). Paradoxically it is Maltes fear of falling that leads him to fall into the depths of his

fear. Only in the second half of the novel will he discover in these depths the possibility of a life

not constrained by death or, put otherwise, a life that no longer faces death as its opposite.

Loving the Unknown

This life belongs to women in love and such women are either mystics or poets, according to

Malte. Sometimes they are both and sometimes they transcend these categories, as is the case

with Maltes aunt Abelone, with whom he would appear to have had intimate relations. He at

least suggests as much, though even this remains unclear, as does so much else concerning

Abelone including her strange name, which Rilke apparently found in J.P. Jacobsens novelFrau

Marie Grubbe.22

But the name could also be a Danish version of Apollonia, as George

Schoolfield speculates, or a play on the name of the French philosopher Abelard, which would

not be inappropriate given that Malte later mentions Hloise as an exemplary female lover and

writer.23

Whatever the origins of Abelones name, it is her voice that stands out. She sings in a

manner that recalls Orpheus, for she moves heaven and earth with her song:

Abelone had one good quality: she sang. That is to say, there were times when she

sang. There was a strong, imperturbable music in her. If it is true that angels aremale, you could say that there was something male in her voice: a radiant,

celestial maleness. (125)

Maltes emphasis on the masculinity of Abelones voice may strike one as odd, especially given

his assertion a few pages later that in Abelone he loved all women (127), which may be the

most banal observation in the novel. Abelones masculinity, however, is central to Maltes

efforts to establish her as an Orphic figure who in singing comes to inhabit the earth and the

heavens.


15/26

15In Rilkes version of the Orpheus myth, the Greek heros dismemberment at the hands of the

Maenads was not the conclusion but the apotheosis of his career as a poet whose song was of

such elemental power that it could change the course of rivers. In effect Rilke collapses the

myths of Orpheus and Dionysus in order to claim that the poets dismemberment enables him to

permeate all living forms, earthly or celestial. In a recent study Patrick Greaney has shown that

Rilke was an avid reader of Nietzsche and especially theBirth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche

argues that Dionysus, following his mutilation, lives on in all things.24

Rilkes emphasis on the

dispersal of the poets seed would suggest that he modeled his figure of Orpheus after Dionysus.

Take for instance the closing lines of theBook of Hoursin which he depicts Francis of Assisi as

a proto-Orphic figure who in dying spreads his seed, which in German also means his semen:

his seed sang / in creeks, his seed sang in trees [sein Samen rann / in Bchen, in den Bumen

sang sein Samen,KAI:252]. And in the Sonnets to Orpheushe celebrates the singers

dismemberment:

Schlielich zerschlugen sie dich, von der Rache gehetzt,Whrend dein Klang noch in Lwen und Felsen verweilte

Und in den Bumen und Vgeln. Dort singst du noch jetzt. (KAII:253)

[They tore you to pieces at last, in a frenzywhile your sound lingered on in lions and rocks,

and in trees and birds. You still sing there.25

]

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, however, Rilke offers an alternative theory of the

origin of poetry which is unique in his work. He turns not to Orpheus but to Sappho for a model

of poetry based on infinite longing and the infinite extension of the body. In other words, he

develops the idea that poetry is based on the expansion of the body rather than its mutilation and

scattering.


16/26

16Malte names an astonishing number of female poets and mystics in the second half of the

novel, often in long lists, but the three principle figures are Bettina von Arnim, Sappho, and

Abelone. Each is an exemplar of intransitive love, a concept he introduces in reference to

Abelone: I know that she longed to purify her love of anything transitive (249). Such a love is

the source of poetry for Malte. Poetry has neither mother nor father but it does have a source in

an impulse that does not belong to any one individual and cannot be satisfied in any object.

Malte must therefore seek out women who by any conventional measure were unlucky in love

and turn their apparent misfortune into the greatest fortunefor them and for us.

In Bettina von Arnim, he finds such a case. Her passionate letters to Goethe never elicited a

commensurate response in part because they exceeded their addressee:

This strange Bettina created space with all her letters, a world of vastly enlargeddimensions. From the beginning she spread herself out through everything, as if

she had already passed beyond her death. Everywhere, she deeply entered into

existence, became part of it, and whatever happened to her had from all eternitybeen contained in nature. (205)

Bettinas great strength as a writer is that she lets herself fall into the space she creates with

every successive word she puts down on the page. She spreads herself out through the whole

of existence, as Malte puts it, which would at first make it seem that in writing Bettina von

Arnim becomes one with nature; she metamorphoses into birds, stars, and trees. A closer look at

the passage, however, reveals the reverse is the case. Nature metamorphoses through Bettinas

writing into a landscape of the heart inasmuch as her writing projects her interior as an exterior

space (a world of vastly enlarged dimensions) in which death is no longer the limit but the

center. This is why Malte can declare that Bettina passe[s] beyond her death. Her letters are

literally outpourings in which she turns or casts out her death so that she may pass through it and

return from it, as if her future were her past and her past a future in the waiting.


17/26

17Malte pays tribute to this almost visceral kind of writing elsewhere in the text, most notably in

a passage concerning the traditional feminine handicraft of lace-making. As a child one of his

favorite pastimes with his mother was to roll out the lace that she collected on a spool which

seemed to hold an inexhaustible supply of fabric. Maltes thoughts turn to the women who made

these various pieces and for no apparent reason he blurts out, The[se] womenhave certainly

gone to heaven (137), to which his mother responds, To heaven? I think they are completely

in these laces. Each one, looked at in the right way, can become an eternal bliss [ewige

Seligkeit] (136-37,KAIII:552). While the association of women and weaving is a familiar

trope from Homer to Freud, the passage pushes the motif in a new direction. It asks what it

means to becompletely in these laces, which are themselves made, produced, crafted.

At issue is to what degree poesy in its original meaning as a production can be the basis for

life and the answer lies partially in the experience of poesy, in finding the right way to look at

it. Malte and his mother begin as detached observers watch[ing] the designs unroll, but they

are gradually drawn into the scenes in front of them; they are absorbed in what they behold: We

stepped outside into the long track of the Valenciennes, and it was an early morning in

winterAnd we pushed through the snowy thicket of the Binche and came to places where no

one had ever been (137). The two can be transported to places where no one had ever been

because they yield entirely to art. They abandon the security of their positions outside the work

and let themselves fall so they can be completely in these laces, like the women who made

them ages ago. This was not a risk Malte was willing to take in Paris, as he himself admits in the

passage previously cited regarding his writing, Just one step, and my misery would turn into

bliss. But I cant take that step (53). Here, however, Malte and his mother take this step. They

leave everything behind and discover in its stead the eternal bliss of a world in which they no


18/26

18longer have to face death because they have already surrendered to it. Death is the condition for

their immersion, if not submersion, in this world in which the love of long deceased lacemakers

continues to unfold as various landscapes, just as Bettina continues to spread herself out

through everything in her letters to Goethe.

The tragedy of women in love, according to Malte, is that their longing is always curtailed.

They are forced to submit to an individual when their desire is to be infinite:

The woman who loves always surpasses the man she lovesHer self-surrender

wants to be infinite: this is her happiness. But the nameless suffering of her lovehas always been that she is required to limit this self-surrender. (207)

Maltes blanket statements about women would be annoying, were they principally concerned

with the plight of women in romantic relationships. Yet even a remark such as this one manages

to pivot from a commentary on women to a reflection on the genre of the lament,Klage, or

elegy, as is evident in the lines immediately following it: There is no other lament that has ever

been lamented by womenIt is as recognizable as a bird-call (207). At first glance Malte

would appear to attribute the lament to a desire that has no other outlet; women who cannot

surrender themselves infinitely in love surrender themselves infinitely in song according to the

classic pattern of compensation. But Malte also turns this argument on its head by insisting that

women in love are devoted to life, not fate, which he defines as the complex patterns and designs

evident in structures like compensation. Seen in this light, the lament is not an outgrowth but a

rejection of fate, in particular the fate of having to surrender to a single individual or love object,

when one wants to be infinite. Infinity can be achieved for Malte only in poetic works,

understood as the outpouring or unfolding of a life no longer constrained by death.

It is often asked why theNotebooksconclude with a series of meditations on love and

especially the love of God, when the work otherwise is not concerned with religion. The shift is


19/26

19all the more conspicuous as it first appears in Maltes reflections on Sappho, who could hardly

be accused of longing for the God of monotheism. Yet, as the passages on Sappho show, it is all

but impossible to speak of love without assigning it a general aim or direction. Malte says of

Sappho,

Perhaps even among the girls formed by her there were some who didnt

understand: how at the height of her activity she lamented, not for one man who

had left her embrace empty, but for the no longer possible one who had grown

vast enough for her love. (242)

Sapphos love can be infinite because it is not directed at anyone save a figure who is no longer

possible as Malte puts it. The insertion of this phrase would at first make it seem that there was

once a man or woman worthy of Sapphos love who had since disappeared. Yet a closer look at

the statement reveals that it is not the choice of suitors but the nature of Sapphos love that

effectively destroys the possibility of a commensurate response. Were Sappho to resign herself to

a single individual, she would compromise her love, which seeks the whole of life, not an

isolated object. But equally importantly she would compromise herself. She would put herself in

the position of a subject who longs for someone apart from her and in so doing mark herself as

finite. Curiously it is the same fear that prevents Abelone from direct[ing] toward God the

calories of her magnificent emotion (249). Malte does not shy away from treating this

existential dilemma as, among other things, a grammatical problem: [Sappho] despised the

thought that of two people one had to be the lover and one the beloved (242). The observation,

however, immediately raises the question whether there could ever be a language appropriate for

a love that transcends subject and object and is purified of anything transitive.

TheNotebooksconclude with two instances of such speech. One is aLiedor song which

constitutes the only verse poem in the work.26 The other is the legend of the Prodigal Son, which

is the only entry that proudly proclaims its status as fiction. If literature can exceed the


20/26

20distinction between subject and object, it is not because it has a grammar of its own, but because

it can explore absence in a manner that does not make it the opposite of presence. In Rilkean

terms, one might say literature makes it possible to read the word death without negation.

The poem is introduced as Malte recounts meeting a Danish singer at a party in Venice.

Although the singer does not resemble Abelone, she immediately reminds Malte of her, because

the two would appear to have the same voice. The singer sings in a voice that is strong, full, and

yet not heavy (248), which is reminiscent of Maltes description of Abelones voice as earthy

and masculine and at the same time celestial. Perhaps for this reason Malte prefaces his account

by saying, One more time during these last years I felt your presence and understood you,

Abelone, unexpectedly, after I had long stopped thinking of you (243). In this one nameless

figure, all the female lovers of the novel merge to sing a song of a lost beloved who returns as

the plenitude of the nature. The final stanza of the poem reads:

Du machst mich allein. Dich einzig kann ich vertauschen.

Eine Weile bist dus, dann wieder ist es das Rauschen,

oder es ist ein Duft ohne Rest.Ach, in den Armen habe ich sie alle verloren

du nur, du wirst immer wieder geboren:

weil ich niemals dich anhielt, halt ich dich fest. (KAIII:628)

When you leave me alone, you are part of the world for me.

You change into all things: you enter the sound of the sea

or the scent of flowers in the evening air.My arms have held them and lost them, again and again.

You, only, are always reborn; and the moment when

I let go of you, I hold on to you everywhere. (249)

The poem hinges on the paradox that a beloved who has departed can nonetheless return in a

manner more immediate than had he or she stayed in the same place. For the poem is not

concerned with the memory of the beloved but his transformation from an isolated individual to

a presence or force that permeates the landscape. Hence the speaker can assert in the first line


21/26

21that the beloved who leaves her also comes back as the whistling of the wind (das Rauschen)

or the scent of a flower (ein Duft). And in the final line she can likewise proclaim that because

I let go of you, I hold on to you everywhere. Freed of the constraints of being an individual

that is, an entity divided from everything elsethe beloved can be reborn as various phenomena

in nature in a process that could continue ad infinitum.

Nature, however, is not a given for Rilke. It has to be accomplished, created through the

outpouring of a poet who in writing surrenders to death to be born anew in a world where the

distinction between subject and object, inside and outside, and life and death no longer obtains.

The parable of the Prodigal Son that concludes the novel is among other things a parable for the

accomplishment of such a world which Rilke called in one essay an island of the heart (KA

IV:648) in anticipation of his later famous formulation, der Weltinnenraum, the worlds inner

space. Critics have generally interpreted the concluding story in allegorical terms, which is not

surprising given that the biblical text is almost universally read as a parable for Gods mercy. Yet

there has been little consensus on whether the story is an allegory of Maltes survival or death,

that is, whether he succeeds in becoming a poet or ceases to write, as anticipated in the first

book.

Rilkes contradictory pronouncements regarding the novel have no doubt contributed to the

confusion concerning the orientation of this tale. In one letter he declares, Poor Malte starts so

deep in misery and, in a strict sense, reaches to eternal bliss.27

More often than not, however, he

insists that the hero is caught in a downward spiral, from which Rilke himself had difficulty

recovering.28

Following the completion of the novel, he suffered a writers block that lasted some

twelve years.


22/26

22More disturbing still is the question of who narrates this tale, especially if it is an allegory of

Maltes demise or alternatively his ascent. Judith Ryans observation that the narrative passages

in the novel constitute hypothetical instances of story-tellingi.e., instances in which Malte

narrates a story by describing how another storyteller would do soonly partially answers this

question, for even when the narration is hypothetical Malte still has to be present to imagine how

another, more capable storyteller would handle the same material.29

The first-person narrator in

the concluding episode no doubt engages in this practice, sometimes overtly as when he states,

Those who have told the story try at this point to remind us of the house as it was thenIt is

reported that one of [the dogs] let out a howl (259). Yet it remains unclear whether the narrator

is Malte or another who takes his place, another who is written into the story to make up for the

absent writer (i.e., Malte) who has in the interim merged with his text.

The legend of the Prodigal Son included in the novel follows the biblical text only in its

broadest outlines. Like the parable in Luke, it is a story of departure and return, though the return

is inconclusive since it is more a formal requirement of the material than an inner necessity.

According to the narrator, the parable is the legend of a man who didnt want to be loved (251)

because of the constraints the love of others placed on him. He could either delight his adoring

family by fulfilling their expectations or disappoint them terribly by refusing to reciprocate their

affections. To avoid this burden, he leaves home, though in the course of his travels he soon

discovers the constraints of the opposing position, that of the lover. Initially he fears that he may

impinge on the freedom of another in his infinite desire for possession (254), but gradually this

fear turns to despair as he becomes convinced that he will never be loved with the same intensity

he devotes to his beloved: He had lost hope of ever meeting the woman whose love could pierce

him (255). His repeated disappointment in this arena leads him to foreswear all companionship


23/26

23and turn to God. In the course of this pursuit he reminded of his childhood and how incomplete it

was, and the thought compels him to return home, as would be expected of any prodigal son.

Here, however, the story breaks with the biblical text and not simply because the son refuses

the embrace of his family which is more than willing to forgive his every trespass. Rather in

refusing their embrace, he also rejects a model of love based on divine mercy and the power to

absolve in favor of another model that would appear to be unyielding, if not merciless. This

model is formulated in the final lines of the text, which have often been read as a sign that

Maltes appeal for love is never answered. The lines read, He was now terribly difficult to love,

and he felt that only One would be capable of it. But he was not yet willing [Der aber wollte

noch nicht] (260,KAIII:635). The capitalization of the pronoun One has led more than one

critic to infer that the figure unwilling to love is God himself. But the lines could be read in

another manner that would be more consistent with the novels exploration of a love that is not

divided between subject and object. According to this reading, the One unwilling to love is no

different than the one terribly difficult to love, the Prodigal Son himself. Grammar dictates that

these two positions be held apart, but the novel turns this requirement to its advantage by

presenting lover and beloved as hypothetical positions, opposing poles in an unfulfilled relation.

Malte is terribly difficult to love because like Sappho, Bettina and Abelone before him he is

not yet willing to love anyone except a no longer possible [lover] who had grown vast enough

for [his] love (242). In pursuing this impossible figure he spreads himself out through

everything; he pours himself out into his notebooks to become an impression that will

transform itself and a text that is the world or landscape of his heart. The legend of the Prodigal

Son is an allegory of Maltes transformation into his notebooks orAufzeichnungenwhere he


24/26

24persists as a lover like Sappho straining after the infinite. In an unpublished poem from 1906

entitled Vom Verlorenen Sohn [The Prodigal Son], Rilke writes:

Jetzt aber la mich, Knig, und geruh,

Wie Du mich einstmals nahmst, mich fortzugeben.Du fragst an wen? An alles. An mein Leben. (KAI:365)

[But let me be now, King. As you once deigned

to take me in, so now deign to let me go.

To whom, you ask. To everything. To my life.]

1Rainer Maria Rilke,Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton, 2 vols.

(New York: Norton, 1945-48), I:360. Translation modified slightly. For the original letter, see Rilke,Briefe in zwei

Bnden, ed. Horst Nalewski (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1991), I:340. The English edition of the letters will hereafter

be referred to asLettersin the notes; Nalewskis edition of Rilkes letters in the original will be referred to asBriefe.2Anthony Stephens,Rilkes Malte Laurids Brigge: Strukturanalyse des erzhlerischen Bewutseins(Bern: Peter

Lang, 1974), 26.3The novel is frequently divided into three thematic clusters: Maltes experiences in Paris, his memories of his

childhood, and his account of the diverse material he has read. Rilke himself identified these groups in a letter to hisPolish translator Witold Hulewicz from November 10, 1925 (LettersII:371,BriefeII:372). Winfried Eckel suggests

that the division of the novel into two books may be more important than it appears given what he views as the

novels dialectical structure. See W. Eckel, Wendung: Zum Proze der poetischen Reflexion im Werk Rilkes(Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 1994), 70-75. Maurice Blanchot also highlights the division of the text intotwo parts and suggests that the mystery of the work is that it continues after its fictional author, Malte, dies or

descends into madness in the first book. See M. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. and intro. by Ann Smock

(Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1982), 130-32. Andreas Huyssen also points to the differences between thenovels two books, albeit in critical terms, since for him the novel moves from a decidedly modern preoccupation

with the urban homeless and poor to a romantic identification with grand lovers from the past in A. Huyssen,

Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), 123.4Martin Heidegger, Wozu Dichter? inHolzwege, 6th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980), 279.

The English translation is from Heidegger, Why Poets? in Off the Beaten Track, tr. Julian Young and KennethHaynes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 212.5Rainer Maria Rilke,Duineser Elegien, in Rilke, Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bnden mit einem

Supplementband, ed. Manfred Engel et al., 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1996), II:234. This edition will be

referred to hereafter parenthetically in the text and in the notes asKA.6Rainer Maria Rilke, The Tenth Elegy, in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen

Mitchell, intro. by Robert Hass (1982; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989), 211.7See in particular Rilkes letter to Lou Andreas-Salom, dated July 18, 1903, which contains many of the sameurban motifs and observations that appear in the first book of the novel. Several paragraphs in the letter on a man

with a nervous twitch are reproduced almost verbatim in the novel. The original German letter is printed inRainer

Maria Rilke / Lou Andreas-Salom: Briefwechsel, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1975), 65-

75. An English translation is included inRainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salom: The Correspondence, tr.Edward Snow and Michael Winkler (New York: Norton, 2006), 50-57.


25/26

25

8Kte Hamburger,Rilke: Eine Einfhrung(Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1976), 77.9Ulrich Flleborn, Form und Sinn derAufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge: Rilkes Prosabuch und der

moderne Roman, inDeutsche Romantheorien: Beitrge zu einer historischen Poetik des Romans in Deutschland,ed. with an Intro. by Reinhold Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Anthenum Verlag, 1968), 256.10

Kte Hamburger was the first critic to point out the striking parallels between Maltes experience of anxiety in hisyouth and as an adult. See Hamburg,Rilke: Eine Einfhrung, 72. Andreas Huyssen has likewise remarked,Memories of childhood past and urban present are rather uncannily intertwined in Maltes psyche, with one

exacerbating the other. The text thus suggests a fundamental affinity between the haunting psychic aspects of

Maltes early childhood experience and the disrupting fragmenting perceptions of the modern city. See. A. Huyssen,

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, in The Cambridge Companion to Rilke, ed. Karen Leeder and RobertVilain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 76.11Malte gets lost in a carnival crowd which he describes as a viscous flood of humanity; he then amplifies the

liquid metaphor by stating, laughter oozed from their mouths like pus from an open wound, in Rilke, The

Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell with an Intro. by William H. Gass (1982; reprint, NewYork: Vintage, 1985), 48. The work will hereafter be cited parenthetically in the text and in the notes. Malte also

attempts to illustrate fear by saying, Like a beetle that someone has stepped on, yougush outof yourself (74,

emphasis added).12

Rilke, Letter to Margot Sizzo, January 6, 1923, inLetters, II:316. The German original reads, Wie der Mond, so

hat gewi das Leben eine uns dauernd abgewendete Seite, die nichtsein Gegen-Teil ist, sondern seine Ergnzungzur Vollkommenheit, zur Vollzhligkeit, zu der wirklichen heilen und vollen Sphre und Kugel des Seins, in

Briefe, II:268, emphasis in original.13

See Heidegger, Wozu Dichter?, 298; in English translation, Why Poets?, 226-27.14Rilke,Letters, II:316,Briefe, II:268.15Rilke, The Eighth Elegy, in Selected Poetry, 193; German original inKAII:225.16Eckel, Wendung, 72-77.17

Ibid., 74.18Eleanor Honig Skoller interprets the episode as a prime example (before the fact) of Lacans mirror-stage and

adds, [Malte] is thrust into the Imaginarythe realm of the specularwhere what he sees is irreducibly separate

from what he is and what he is is irrevocably connected to what he sees. See E. H. Skoller, Threads in Three

Sections: A Reading of the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, in SubStance10:3 (1981): 16.19See Emile Benveniste, The Nature of Pronouns and Subjectivity in Language, inProblems in General

Linguistics, tr. Mary Elisabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971), 217-22 and 223-30respectively. In both essays Benveniste discusses the deictic function of the first-person, singular pronoun whichrefers to the very discourse in which it is introduced.20Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 131. Blanchot also examines the passage as the hidden center of the novel

which, according to him, Rilke inserted early in the work to see if the text could continue after its heros death.21The inclusion of an editors occasional notes in the novel only contributes to the fiction that there was once a

writer named Malte Laurids Brigge who died and whose papers have been published posthumously. Rilke himselfdescribed the novel as the proverbial manuscript found in the attic in a letter to Manon zu Solms-Laubach from

April 11, 1910: It is only as if one found disordered papers in a drawer and just happened for the present to find no

more and had to be content (LettersI:364). In a first draft of the opening of the novel, Rilke played up the editor

function. A first-person narrator recalls the time he spent with Malte, who has since disappeared, and expresses hiscommitment to writing down the remarkable stories that his departed friend told him. SeeKAIII:639.22The editors ofKommentierte Ausgabesuggest this possibility, though it is by no means conclusive. SeeKA

III:956.23George C. Schoolfield, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, inA Companion to the Works of Rilke,

ed. Erika A. Metzger and Michael M. Metzger (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2001), 182.24Patrick Greaney, Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin(Minneapolis: Univ. of

Minnesota Press, 20080, 95-99. For Nietzsches thoughts on Dionysus dismemberment and dispersal, see the tenth

chapter in theBirth of Tragedyand especially the passage, In truth, however, the hero is the suffering Dionysus ofthe Mysteries, the god experiencing in himself the agonies of individuation, of whom wonderful myths tell that as a

boy he was torn to pieces by the Titans and now is worshipped in this state as Zagreus. Thus it is intimated that his

dismemberment, the properly Dionysiansuffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth and fire, in


26/26

26

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, tr. with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York:

Random House, 1967), 73.25

Rilke, Sonnet I:26, in Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. with Intro. by David Young (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan Poetry inTranslation, 1987), 53.26

The song is a single poem but Malte separates it into two parts which follow each other in close succession.27Rilke, letter to Anton Kippenberg, March 25, 1910, inLettersI:361.28See for instance Rilkes letter to Lou Andreas-Salom from December 28, 1911. Rilke writes, Can you

understand that after this book [Malte Laurids Brigge] I have been left behind just like a survivor, helpless in my

inmost soul, no longer to be used? The nearer I came to the end of writing it, the more strongly did I feel that it

would be an indescribable division, a high watershed, as I kept telling myself; but now, it turns out that all the waterhas flowed off toward the old side, and I am going down into an aridity [und ich in eine Drre heruntergeh] that will

not change. And if it were merely that: but the other fellow, the one who went under [der Andere, der

Untergegangene], has somehow used me up, carried on the immense expenditure of his going under [Untergang]

with the strength and materials of my life, there is nothing that was not in his hands, in his heart, he appropriatedeverything with the intensity of his despair; scarcely does a thing seem new to me before I discover the break in it,

the rough place where he tore himself off, inLetters, II:32-33 andBriefeI:368. Rilke frequently refers in his letters

to Maltes Untergang(demise, destruction or descent).29

Judith Ryan, Hypothetisches Erzhlen: Zur Funktion von Phantasie und Einbildung in Rilkes Malte Laurids

Brigge, inRainer Maria Rilke, ed. Rdiger Grner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), 245-84.

Rilke Malte Love

Documents

Transcript of Rilke Malte Love